Hah. I spent more time writing this post in the gaps between waiting for work stuff to finish work stuffing. I can't just... not sit down for work for an arbitrary amount of time because I'm busy arguing with the Linux Nvidia drivers.

I agree that's the point of Bazzite, though. So if it doesn't in fact "just work" for me, then what's the point of it?

To boot into a semi-functional but not updated Bazzite, probably. Takes 5 to get to Windows, though.

To get my system up to full functionality and up to date... their history with massive, feature-breaking issues, and they do have one, is maybe a couple of weeks for a patch and then some time seeing what the fallout of the broken stuff is around your software in general.

Although that's on a good day. Bluetooth has been entirely nonfunctional on this Bazzite install for months and going by how long ago people have been mentioning it with this specific hardware I don't think that one is going away anytime soon.

That hasn't been the case since... what? Windows 7? All the Win 10/11 installs I have around the place are some version of the preinstalled OEM Windows setup or the initial install I made when I did it myself. There is no meaningful performance degradation on any of them that I can notice, and I believe there have been benchmarks done recently showing similar outcomes. Linux can't afford to argue about Windows XP issues as if they were current. For the record, no, Windows won't force you to reset mid-work to make an install anymore, either. It defaults to installing updates on reboot, just like Bazzite (you can turn it off on Bazzite and not on Windows, though).

Also, HDR is absolutely not "a feature only 1% uses". The past four monitors I've purchased had HDR support, not because I wanted it, just because it came with them. My last laptop came with it out of the box. All the TVs I've purchased for myself and relatives for many years have it (not even sure if they make non-HDR TVs anymore, in fact). It's supported by all current-gen consoles, now the Switch 2 has added support for it, too. It's also supported by the Steam Deck, incidentally.

So no, not a niche feature anymore, by a long shot. It's baseline compatibility for any display made this decade. And for a gaming computer it's an absolute must, especially if you want to do TV out with it, which I do. As will the upcoming Steam Machine. Again, can't SMASH WINDOWS for gaming if games outright look better on Windows than Linux when they come out of my screen. That's not how that works.

Even if that wasn't the case, though. My monitors are already HDR. This is about the OS being compatible with the hardware I already own. I'm not paying for features I can't use because the software is incompatible with it for no good reason.

FWIW, Bazzite isn't any better than Fedora, it's just... Fedora. It has a couple of gaming-friendly features, including booting into a controller interface by default (which doesn't work well on Nvidia cards, so meh) and specific compatibility for certain gaming hardware, particularly for handhelds and gaming laptops, which can be very useful if you're on a portable gaming device that struggles under Windows but is not officially supported on SteamOS. You can rebase directly from it to the Fedora atomic distro matching your DE if you want (can't rebase across DE's, annoyingly).

There were literally huge G-Sync logos in the boxes of the last three TVs I helped people buy. When you plug in a game console and press the settings button on my current display in game mode it pops up a large HUD element that says "VRR" and displays the type of VRR currently active and the current framerate. Every other option and metric is hidden away in a sub-menu.

Not that this matters, because the point of VRR is you don't need to know it's there. If it's working, the drivers and the display should talk to each other transparently. The end result if you have a Windows machine with VRR and a Linux machine that doesn't support it and you plug them both to the same display is, again, that the Windows game will look smoother, regardless of how many fps it's spitting out.

And as always, a reminder I've given many, many, many times in my life, both personally and professionally, "it works on my machine" means nothing and doesn't mean there's no bug or that your code isn't crap. Your anecdotal experience and my anecdotal experience aren't the same, because I have a showstopper bug and your seven friends don't, which still means there's a showstopper bug.